Anita Brookner’s Booker-Prize–Winning ‘Hotel du Lac’: Room for One

Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac (Vintage, $12.95, paperback) could make an ideal antidote to shows like The Bachelor, and not just because its heroine never talks about “taking it to the next level.” Thirty-nine-year-old Edith Hope checks into a Swiss hotel, intending to lie low for a while, after backing out of her wedding to a dullard. But during her stay she receives a marriage proposal from a very different sort of man. Can she – and should she – accept? Brookner ‘s suspenseful and psychologically complex answer won the 1984 Booker Prize and helped to establish her reputation as one of England’s finest moralists. And Hotel du Lac still one of the best modern novels in which, as Anne Tyler wrote, the heroine finds “a nonromantic, wryly realistic appreciation of her single state.”